Saturday, April 9, 2016

"Techno-nirvana is going mainstream but at what cost?" (now with added cosplay)

The writer is the founding editor of FT Alphaville, here scribing away for the paper.
From the Financial Times:

We
had news this week that Circle Internet Financial, a US start-up, was
hooking up with Barclays in the UK to allow users of its mobile app to
transfer money to other users of its app. Circle Internet will take a
sterling amount from your bank account, turn it into bitcoin, send it to
your nominated recipient and then turn it back into sterling.

Logical thinkers might assume that the most efficient way to transfer
sterling to someone else over the internet is to send them sterling
direct using any one of the many existing services rather than faff
about with a stupid crypto currency that takes a thousand times longer
to clear through the payment system and burns holes in the ozone layer
in the process.

Sure, the existing online payment transfer systems may be clunky and
ripe for improvement but do we really need to go to the trouble of
co-opting a comic, energy-burning software platform promoted by
techno-utopians who want to abolish the idea of central government?

But that would be anti-bitcoin thinking — and an
affront to some of the most intelligent people in the country, such as
the government’s chief scientific adviser. Sir Mark Walport told us
earlier this year that systems based on bitcoin’s distributed public
ledger, the blockchain, might well save the National Health Service and
will certainly help with a host of other public service functions, from issuing passports to collecting taxes. Somehow.

One piece of eagerly anticipated bitcoin news that didn’t happen this
week was the rumoured revelation of the real identity of the person
known as Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of bitcoin.

As my colleague Izabella Kaminska revealed on FT Alphaville,
our financial blog, advisers purporting to work for Craig Wright, an
Australian tech entrepreneur, who was named as Satoshi late last year,
have been trying to get certain media organisations in London to sign up
to embargoes ahead of a so-called Big Reveal here, this week or next.

Wright, it is said, will perform some sort of crypto-miracle, proving
his credentials — which has set off another wave of manic bitcoin
debate across the web over whether the Australian is a conman or the
real deal.

Should
we worry that all this wing-nuttery is going increasingly mainstream?
Perhaps all this is just a financial version of cosplay, the fantasy
games enjoyed by many adults, dressing up in elaborate costumes to play
out their dreams. Cosplay apparently offers therapeutic help and a
creative outlet to those working with dreams and memories, be it from a
book or a movie or simply a character they have made up themselves.

There’s something similar with bitcoin, allowing financial minds to
roam free in a techno-nirvana, slaying mighty beasts such as the Bank of
England along the way....MORE